Aleyda Solis covers five SEO updates: Google discontinues Special Announcement schema July 31, John Mueller explains removing sites from search, and David Bell's AI benchmark ranks Claude first, Perplexity and Google strong, while Gemma and X-Roc lag. Amanda Natividad from SparkToro discusses content strategy for a zero-click world.
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The top SEO news of the week, brought to you by the SEO FOMO to Learn, Then Read. Today's edition is sponsored by Ahrefs. Thank you very much for your sponsorship. Let's see which are the hottest SEO news. The first one is that Google is stopping the support of the Special Announcement structured data, which will happen on July 31st. This is a coverage by Barry Schwartz about this. Update. We need to remember that this structured data was introduced during COVID as a way to communicate special announcements from websites and businesses related to health and safety. So very likely it doesn't seem to be relevant anymore. The second most clicked news is the coverage by Robert Monty of an answer by John Mueller to someone who asked how to remove a site from search without verifying ownership. John Mueller responded with an option that they could use if they don't have a verified website in the Google Search Console, providing this particular URL requesting a refresh of outdated content in Google Search. The other top SEO resource of the week is David Bell's and Previsible's announcement about their new AI SEO benchmark showcasing the results of how the top LLMs in the market perform in SEO tasks. They have created this very useful leaderboard that they will be updating reading frequently here, showcasing the score of each one of the top LLMs in the market when requested to do very common SEO tasks. In the announcement here, they provide the top takeaways so far, like Claude being the top-performing one by far, Perplexity and Google seeming to be the logical winners, and Meta's Gemma and X-Roc not appearing to be that useful for answering SEO questions. They disclose a little bit more about the performance per category of questions and the type of questions that they ask over here. It's definitely interesting to see the level of accuracy and helpfulness of these tools in SEO tasks, since a lot of SEOs and non-SEOs are starting to use them too. Last but not least is the insightful interview by Gianluca Fiorelli to Amanda Natividad, who's the VP of Marketing at SparkToro. She's a very experienced content marketer that shares quite a few insights about how to win in content marketing in a zero-click world, how to make the most out of brand marketing for your content, how to develop in-depth audience research, how to leverage competition and influencers for brand growth, and much more. This is an insightful interview that you cannot miss if you want to start differentiating yourself with your content. Finally, I want to thank our today's sponsor, which is Ahrefs. With their new web analytics. It is a simple free alternative to Google Analytics that if you haven't checked, is very straightforward to implement. In fact, I have it in a couple of my own websites. It provides straightforward reports and allows to compare the data in a very helpful, flexible way. Thank you for watching today's edition of the SEO FOMO to London and Read with the top SEO stories of the week. And if you don't want to wait until the next week, remember to go and take a look at the SEO FOMO News where SEOs share the latest in SEO in real time. Remember to like the video if you like it and subscribe to the channel to avoid missing out. Until the next one, bye-bye.
